The other French prophecy, to which allusion has been made, professes to be only of a much later date. It is said to have emanated from a Jesuit priest, who died towards the end of the last century at Bordeaux, in the "odour of sanctity," and to have been communicated by him to a novice residing with him in an establishment of the Jesuits at Poitiers, some time previous to the outbreak of the first French Revolution. It is supposed to have been transcribed and preserved by the novice, who afterwards became himself a Jesuit priest, and by him to have been given into the hands of several persons, who still possess it, or who may have in turn given circulation to it. Not much importance was attached to it until the events of the Revolution, which confirmed so many of its predictions, were accomplished; and again, since the events of the present year, it has been called to men's minds. Like the Orval prophecy, its predictions, as regards what is now past, have been wonderfully distinct, and, relative to the events of this present year, no less so. With respect to its existence previously to these latter events, the writer can also give testimony, as in the case of the Orval prophecy, that it was transcribed as far back as the year 1836, from the mouth of the supérieure of a convent in Lyons, who testified that she had heard it from the novice to whom it was first delivered. The authenticity of its prophetic revelations can thus be proved as far as regards the present day. It bears, in many respects, a great analogy to the Previsions of the Solitary of Orval, and the predictions it delivers coincide in most respects with the latter: but it contains distinct references to other events, of which the Orval prophecy makes no mention. As the revelation also of a holy churchman, prophetically inspired, its contents naturally refer, in a great measure, to the state of the church, or perhaps even to the condition of the order of the Jesuits alone. The whole is necessarily couched in mysterious language in this respect: and it ought, perhaps, to be premised that the "counter-revolution" alluded to refers to the triumph of the priesthood in general, or, as was before said, of the Jesuit order. The portions of this prophecy which have fallen into the writer's hands refer only to the events immediately following the fall of Napoleon; although he has been assured that, in other copies, it goes back to circumstances antecedent to the first Revolution.
"There will then be a reaction," says the portion now before us, "which shall be thought to be the counter-revolution—it will last during some years, so that people shall suppose that peace is really restored: but it will be only a patchwork—an ill-sewn garment. There will be no schism; but still the Church shall not triumph. Then shall come disturbances in France: a name hateful to the country shall be placed upon the throne. It will not be until after that event that the counter-revolution shall take place. It will be done by strangers. But two parties will first be formed in France, who will carry on a war of extermination. One party will be much more numerous than the other, but the weaker shall prevail. Blood will flow in the great towns, and the convulsion shall be such that men might think the last day to be at hand. But the wicked will not prevail, and in this dire catastrophe shall perish of them a great multitude. They will have hoped to have utterly destroyed the Church; but for this they will not have had time, for the fearful crisis shall be of short duration. There will be a movement when it will be supposed that all is lost; but still all shall be saved. The faithful shall not perish; such signs will be given them as shall induce them to fly the city. During this convulsion, which will extend to other lands, and not be for France alone, Paris shall be so utterly destroyed, that when, twenty years afterwards, fathers shall walk with their children, and the children shall ask, 'Why is that desolate spot?' they shall answer, 'My children, here once stood a great city, which God destroyed for its crimes.' After this fearful convulsion, all will return to order, and the counter-revolution shall be made. Then shall the triumph of the Church be such that nothing like it shall be ever seen again, for it will be the last triumph of the Church on earth."
In one respect, at least, this prophesy has already taken a step towards fulfilment. "Two parties shall be formed in France." Does not the struggle between the Moderates and the Red-Republicans still harass the land? "They will carry on a war of extermination." Have they not already commenced it in June in the streets of Paris? "One party will be much more numerous than the other." The Moderate party is well known to have an immense majority throughout the country. "But the weaker shall prevail"—for a time, that is—goes on to say the fearful prediction. That result lies yet in the womb of fate. The probabilities of its fulfilment we shrink from investigating—the more so, as it is a conviction which has always instinctively forced itself upon our minds. In all their previsions on this subject, the two prophesies, as far as they go, perfectly agree. We do not even leave the sceptical the pleasure of finding out that "doctors differ." The collision of parties—the devouring beasts—and the eventual destruction of the "great city" in the struggle—are circumstances foretold in both, with a graphic force which gives them almost the minuteness of details relative to a history of the past. The triumph of the Church, after this great convulsion, is likewise prophesied by both. The Orval previsions, more diffuse as to general history, alone connect this event with the restoration of a Prince of the Lily. On the contrary, however, the prediction of the Jesuit—as yet only occupied with the interests of his Church—now goes on to foretell historical events, of which the Orval prophecy makes no mention. The two do not contradict each other, but each mentions circumstances of which the other does not speak.
"These events shall be known to be at hand," continues the Poitiers prophecy, "by the sign that England shall begin to suffer throes of pain, even as it is known that the summer is nigh when the fig-tree puts forth its leaves. England shall experience a revolution, which will be of sufficient duration to give unhappy France time to breathe. Then it shall be by the assistance of France that England shall be fully restored to peace."
Certainly there appears at present no probability of any accomplishment of this part of the prediction. And, whatever vague faith we may place in our innermost hearts upon the authenticity of these prophecies, we should be very glad to find ourselves, and avow ourselves, and even proclaim ourselves, utter dupes, rather than witness the slightest approach to a fulfilment of the last paragraph of the Jesuit priest's oracular revolutions. He has given us, however, a fair chance of learning the truth of his prediction, or of giving him the lie in his coffin, by an answer, which the tradition preserved by the excellent supérieure of the convent of the Sacré Cœur at Lyons reports that he made, when asked as to the period of the fulfilment of his prophecies—for he had not, like the Solitary of Orval, been at all precise in his arithmetical calculations of moons, or other methods of bestowing dates, as we have seen. His answer is said to have been, that those who saw the first French Revolution, and who lived through this crisis, would bless God for having preserved them to be witnesses of the great triumph of His Church. Consequently, the events foretold ought to receive their fulfilment in a period of time within the probable life of a man born before the epoch of 1789; and thus, reckoning the "threescore years and ten" as the utmost limit of man's natural life, before the year 1859. We ourselves, and all our readers, it is to be hoped, have thus the probabilities before us of testing the powers of prophecy of the good old gentleman of Poitiers. And yet, if they are to be verified to the letter as concerns "Old England," we cannot add "May we be there to see."
Beyond these two prophecies, there are others which at the present time abound in France; but as we are unable to offer any evidence whatever as to their authenticity of antiquity, we shall not enter into their details, much less into any disquisition as to their credibility. Most of them predict the utter destruction of Paris by fire, during a convulsion occasioned by insurrection and civil war. The best known are those of Bug de Thilas, a prophet of the Pyrenees in the sixteenth century—a Breton traditionary prediction, which enters into very minute and graphic details relative to the great fire of Paris, and fixes the epoch for this disaster in the nineteenth century; and the far better known and somewhat famous Prophétie Lorraine, in verse, in which the same event is foretold. This latter prophecy enters into very minute poetical descriptions of the great catastrophe, and warns the Parisian that he will perish entirely by his own fault. It is more especially curious, inasmuch as a calculation has been made by a good, hearty, and sound believer in such predictions, in which it is shown that, by taking the most striking and important words of the prediction, and reckoning each letter as a number, according to its standing in the alphabet—"a" as 1, "b" as 2, "c" as 3, &c.—the sum total of all the letters, thus reckoned, will amount to eighteen hundred and forty-nine. Of course, also, the prediction made by Lady Hester Stanhope to Lamartine, as recorded by that author in his Voyage en Orient, and founded by herself on cabalistic and astronomical calculations, found enthusiastic commentators in France, when the poet at last reached the object of his ambition, and became a statesman, by being placed at the summit of power in the revolutionary government.
The other prediction, or rather prophetic deduction from analytical interpretations of the Book of Revelations, to which allusion has been made, is too singular not to take its place also among these supposed "foreshadowings of coming events." At the same time, we do not attempt to rank it in any way in the same category with those strange and doubtful revelations already given. It is based upon a system of reasoning and calculation: a key is given as the real and true one, for the opening of the door of mysteries of acknowledged divine origin. How far this key may be the right one or the wrong, or how far it may be permitted to use it, are, once more, subjects for disquisition into which it is not for us to enter. The contrast between the nature of the revelations of the Roman Catholic ascetics, and of those of the Protestant clergyman, is striking enough to preclude any analogy between them. On the one hand, we have confident predictions; on the other, the cool, calm, searching, calculations of a system of minute reasoning;—on the one, the supposed bestowal of the flash of light; on the other, the careful groping in the mystical darkness of sacred writings, in order with true conscience to find the right way;—on the one, the pictorial, graphic, highly-coloured language of the presumed "divine afflatus;" on the other, the deductions of speculative reasoning;—on the one, the supposed flame coming from above; on the other, the cautious steps planted on the earth;—in short, on the one, supposed inspiration; on the other, evident and acknowledged reason. We do not pretend to class them together; but as they all refer to the same periods of history, they find mention together in this notice.
The Rev. Robert Fleming was the Protestant minister of the Scotch churches at Rotterdam and Leyden, and afterwards of the Presbyterian church of Lothbury, during the reign of William III.; he was renowned for his piety as well as his learning, and was even much favoured by the reigning monarch. His Discourse concerning the Rise and Fall of Papacy, in which the prophetic deductions have been formed, was published in the year 1701. The species of mystical history of the Romish church, which forms the main subject of his work, is sought for entirely, by the author, in the prophetic enunciations of the Book of Revelations; and in order to attach a great interest to his interpretations, and the deductions thence drawn, it is necessary to accept à priori, as a matter of faith, those postulata, which the author considers certain at his very outset, and which he sets down as incontrovertible,—namely, that "the Revelations contain the series of all the remarkable events and changes of the state of the Christian church to the end of the world;" that "The mystical Babylon doth typify Rome in an anti-Christian church state;" that "The seven heads of the beast are indubitably the seven forms of government that obtained successively among the Romans;" and that, consequently, "The grand apocalyptical question answers the great antichrist," which is thus assumed to be Papal Rome. Once more, it is not our present purpose to enter into any theological discussions: we do no more than place before our readers the curious and interesting deduction of a divine, celebrated for his piety, his learning, and his sacred research. The key with which Fleming proceeds to open the mysteries of what he calls "the dark apocalyptical times and periods," is certainly of singularly ingenious construction. He commences by entering into a proof that the different periods mentioned, of 1260 days, of forty-two months, and of "a time, times, and a half," are absolutely synchronical, and refer exactly to the same period of time, being meant to describe the duration of the anti-Christian kingdom; and that each day must be taken to mean prophetically a year, or Julian year of that age. By a similarly ingenious calculation, relative to the dates and times of days, he ascribes the period, as regards the church, to the so-called rotations of the all-enlightening sun; and as refers to the Beast, to the rotations of the unstable moon. Upon these calculations he goes on, with singularly marvellous ability, and an infinite patience of minute reckoning, to comment upon the apocalyptic prophecies. He traces thus the regular series of the prophecy, in the opening of the seven seals, which, in his application of historical events, he refers to the condition of the Christian church during the Roman empire;—of the seven trumpets, as bearing relation to the gradual growth and increase of the anti-Christian enemies of the church;—and, lastly, of the seven vials, as plagues and judgments poured out upon that Babylon, which he assumes to be "Rome Papal;" and the vials, more especially, he argues upon as types of the struggles between the Roman and the Reformed parties, each vial typifying an event, or conclusion of some new periodical attack of the former upon the latter. It is not necessary to follow the ingenious and indefatigable commentator through all his explanations of the other vials; we only refer to his deductions as bearing upon "Prophecies for the Present." Our business lies chiefly with his interpretation of the fifth vial, inasmuch as, by his system of calculation, he predicts the fulfilment of this vial for a period, which, by a singular coincidence at least, he fixes between the two dates of 1794 and 1848. It is the express mention of this latter year which naturally attracts the attention as an extraordinary coincidence, at a moment when, in that year, so many convulsions, and so many events important in the history of the world, have taken place. There is no precise prophetic deductions, however, attached by the interpreter to this latter datum, except that he fixes it as the period of the fall, or at least of the tottering and probable decline, of the Papal power; and, in the present wavering condition of the temporal power of the sovereign pontiff, the deduction has, at least, a singular bearing upon the events of the latter year specified. It was at the period of the former year, however, that the interpretations of Fleming, made at a time when France was in the zenith of her power, and there seemed no probability whatever of their justice, excited at first a great sensation; probably at the time of their delivery they were looked upon merely as matters of interesting and patient analysis. In commenting upon the fourth vial of the Revelations, which he mentions as likely to expire about the year 1794, he says—"the pouring out of this vial on the sun must denote the humiliation of some eminent potentates, whose influence and countenance cherish and support the Papal cause. And these, therefore, may be principally understood of the houses of Austria and Bourbon." In continuing to give his opinion concerning the events connected with this vial, and much posterior to the time in which he lived, we have the following striking expressions also, which, even in their serious importance, are not without their quaint humour:—"Perhaps the French monarchy may begin to be considerably humbled about that time; for whereas the French king takes the sun for his emblem, and this for his motto—'Nec plurìbus impar,' he may at length, or rather his successors, and the monarchy itself, (at least before the year 1794,) be forced to acknowledge that (in respect to neighbouring potentates) he is even singulis impar." The extraordinary coincidence between these intimations and the date fixed by the interpreter, when the first French Revolution took place, could not fail to strike the minds of those who were acquainted with his work. Accordingly, the Discourse was republished in 1792, and was read and commented upon with avidity; and now that, in the year he named as 1848, another of his prophetic intimations came to be more or less exemplified, and another coincidence was destined to strike the minds of men, after the sagacious and learned interpreter had been dead nearly a century and a half, the whole discourse has been again republished in a variety of forms, and very widely circulated.
It has been "in fear and trembling" that we have ventured to approach any subject of so sacred a character, inasmuch as it refers to undeniable divine revelations, and bears upon one of the books of the Holy Scriptures: the matter, however, was so intimately connected with our present subject, that it could not be well avoided. Upon the absolute acceptance of Fleming's interpretations, and upon his assumption, à priori, that the "scarlet woman of Babylon" and the anti-Christ do verily typify the Papal power, we must needs be still more cautious of entering into any argument: it is not for us to reason upon the "how, when, and where" of the anti-Christian "denying spirit."
As connected with "Prophecies for the Present," the writer may yet add one other, which was known to him in Germany many years ago. The latter part of it runs as follows:—"I would not be a king in 1848. I would not be a soldier in 1849. I would not be a gravedigger in 1850." There was an awful solemnity in these last words, that always struck fearfully upon the imagination. "I would be any thing you will in 1851." Again, also, there is a vague ambiguous sense in this latter expression, that gives a shudder to the whole frame. "What you will!" Does the term refer to future hope in better days, or is it the recklessness of despair? There were, attached to this prophecy, other remarks respecting the preceding years: they referred to the corn-blade and the vine-plant; but they have now passed too much out of the writer's memory to be exactly recorded.